This post was originally published on Defender Network
By Aswad Walker
Black community, what can we do to give our student-athletes a fighting chance?
Think about it. Universities that depend on Black student-athletes to bring them national championships (i.e. more money), free publicity which translates to higher enrollment (i.e. more money), and increased alumni giving (i.e. more money), are making it known that those college don’t give a @#$% about Black students not on the football, basketball or track teams.
University Anti-Blackness
How do we know this? The University of Alabama, Texas A&M, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina, all schools in Florida and so many others that have relied on Black student-athlete greatness to bring acclaim (and money) to those schools, have all shut down DEI programs, fired Black staff in DEI offices, ended affirmative actions, killed scholarships for Black students and terrorized teachers who dared teach the actual racist history of this nation.
Bruce Pearl, the head men’s basketball coach of the Crimson Tide’s rival, Auburn University (also located in Alabama), recently went all the way in on his anti-Blackness. Pearl, who has become a multi-millionaire off the blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice of young, Black male hoopers, recently tweeted that VP Kamala Harris is a lying, woke Socialist.
The concentric circles of the Vinn Diagram on 1) folk who attack Kamala Harris, 2) folk who use the word “woke” as a political insult, 3) folk who label everyone they disagree with a “Socialist” and 4) folk who call intelligent Black women “liars” simply because the sisters and smarter than the name-callers, is the epicenter of anti-Blackness.
In Florida, they not only shut down all programs created to support Black students after centuries of purposeful, legal segregation, but that state also gathered a “clan” of folk to not only celebrate their state’s banning of Black books, they dumped hundreds (if not thousands) of Black books into a landfill to underscore and highlight Florida’s total disdain for Black humanity.
Parent/Student Conundrum
What does all this have to do with the Black community coming together to give our student-athletes a fighting chance at life? Well, it’s easy for me, a parent whose sports-playing children have long since graduated from college, to say, “Black high school athletes need to take a stand and refuse to go to those schools that have shown us their true colors when it comes to their feelings about Black people.”
It’s easy for me to say, “Parents of Black student-athletes with dreams of playing ball in college should direct them as far away from Texas A&M, UT, Alabama, Auburn, the University of North Carolina, all Florida schools, and any other universities that have ended support programs for Black students.”
But when the UTs and Alabamas of the world are heralded as the gold standard, and when those schools come at our youth with more scholarship money and potential NIL deals than you can shake a stick at, and when those kids and their parents don’t see that same level of financial support from HBCUs (ironically, because of anti-Black-related historical state and federal underfunding), those student-athletes are going to choose, more often than not, those schools whose actions scream anti-Blackness.
This conundrum – seeking entrance into a university that promises to treat you right personally (as a student-athlete) while openly initiating anti-Black policies – underscores something we don’t like to discuss; Black institutional powerlessness.
Power resides not in titles or the amount of money in your bank account but rather in the institutions you own and control. And we don’t own any higher ed institutions with DI or DII or DIII athletic programs. Hell, we don’t own any higher ed institutions, period.
We Need Institutional Power
So, what is the Black parent and/or Black student-athlete who is insulted by the anti-Blackness displayed by these universities, yet has dreams of playing college ball and beyond, to do?
Sadly, I have no answers to offer beyond issuing a call to the Black community – to the businesses, faith institutions, K-thru-college institutions located in our neighborhoods, to come up with ways to give our kids options. They shouldn’t have to go to schools that openly disdain Black humanity. But until we create our own (and fund our own), or until we build so much political will that these schools are forced to bend to our will, our student-athletes will remain stuck between a rock and a hard place.
